11g New Features - Utilities

Compressed Dump File Sets : Data Pump provides the ability to compress the metadata of a dump file set, which can shrink the dump files by 10-15%. In this release, Data Pump adds the ability to compress the entire dump file set, including data and metadata. This feature lets you specify compression for metadata, row data, or the entire dump file set. Data Pump API Enhancements : The Data Pump API has been enhanced to allow individual worker processes to be restarted after a failure without terminating the Data Pump job. This enhancement improves availability when using the parallel capabilities of Data Pump. The new DATA_REMAP API allows you to specify transformations to be applied to data during export or import. This can be useful when you need to obfuscate sensitive data while retaining its data type, structure, or format which may be needed when moving data from a production system to a test environment. Database Upgrade/Downgrade Enhancements : The pre-upgrade information utility has improved resource estimations, and the post-upgrade status tool has improved error message generation and display. Over the past releases, improvements have been made to simplify both manual upgrades and upgrades done using the Database Upgrade Assistant (DBUA). This feature further reduces the complexity of database upgrades and gives DBAs more information they can use to determine whether their database upgrade was successful. Oracle Data Pump External Table Enhancement: In 10g releases of Data Pump, a row error in an external table caused the entire table load to abort, requiring you to reload the table. This feature ensures that a row error does not cause a table load to abort, thus saving load time. SQL*Plus BLOB Support: This feature allows you to verify the contents of BLOB columns. Cheers Vignesh Bala